The format and content requirements of passwords, again, depends on the account system where a user's identity is defined. Passwords defined for users in the _User table accounts can be a string of up to 16 case-sensitive characters. (If you type more than 16 characters in the Password field, the additional characters are not accepted.) When you add the password to the _User table accounts, the password is encoded with the ENCODE function. Because OpenEdge internal passwords are case-sensitive, ENCODE returns different values for uppercase and lowercase input.